In this year’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, published in The Nation, activist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd discusses Said’s 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate,” which critiques how Western coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese War was biased toward the Israeli narrative and suppressed the Palestinian point of view. El-Kurd identifies a similar situation at hand today, with Western mainstream media creating a false dichotomy in which Palestinians “are either victims or terrorists” and only deemed sympathetic if they are “perfect victims.” Countering this, El-Kurd writes: “We are human not just because we cry when we lose our mothers, or when we lose our homes, or because we have pets or hobbies. We are humans because we feel rage and we feel disdain—because we resist.”
Parapraxis magazine has announced that it will publish a rolling online issue about Palestine. In the first piece, Nadia Bou Ali writes about life in the face of death, “the very concept of living,” and despair.
In the new episode of the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast, hosts Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield talk with Jade E. Davis about her new book, The Other Side of Empathy.
Gaza’s main public library has been destroyed. Municipal authorities have condemned Israel for what they call the deliberate destruction of thousands of historical documents and books. Gaza City officials have also called for UNESCO intervention to “protect cultural centers and condemn the occupations’s targeting of these humanitarian facilities protected under international humanitarian law.”
Prophet Song by Irish novelist Paul Lynch is the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.
For Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage Month, 4Columns revisits four reviews of Native art and literature, including Jennifer Krasinski on Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 and Julie Phillips on Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence.